Nikki looked down. In one hand she still held the burning oil lamp from upstairs. She needed one more. She rushed back to the library, stepping over Falkenstein’s eviscerated corpse, holding her breath against the stench of offal. She found an ornate, glass, flat-wick kerosene lantern on one of the study tables. The sounds of Adam’s struggle with the leopard beast across the hall sounded dire, but she had to make a run for this, and wouldn’t be able to help him otherwise. This is what they’d agreed to do, and she damn well intended to do it.
Holding both lamps in one hand while she opened the great door, she peered into the grim darkness of the stairwell that led down into the catacombs. She raised the oil lamp even as it occurred to her it might be better to extinguish it. She could see the flicker of torchlight far below, and tried not to guess who or what might be down there to greet her.
It didn’t matter. She was going down.
Nikki transferred the heavy kerosene lantern to her right hand, and held the burning oil lamp in her left, lifting it up in front of her to light the way. The fear of descending the staircase in darkness was greater than her fear of someone seeing the lantern from below.
The stairway’s shadows rolled back against the lamp’s glow. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, tension hummed through her like electrical current, making her light-headed. Her muscles felt tight. She gripped the handles of the lanterns, white knuckled.
The long hallway that led into the catacombs stretched before her, stone walls soaking up the shadows. She went to the door she remembered from last night (had it only been last night?) and saw that it, too, was unlocked. She pressed her ear against it and listened. The door was thick, and though she thought she perceived whispering beyond, the only thing she could really hear and identify for sure was the surge of her pulse and the pounding of her heart.
I can do this, she thought.
Nikki reached forward and pulled open the door.
The smell—that earthy dankness mixed with the scents of grave rot and aquatic life—washed over her as she stepped inside, knowing if she hesitated even a minute, she’d run back up those stairs and away from this place forever.
She forced her steps. Her legs seemed to carry her of their own volition, trembling so much she felt like she was bouncing with each step. Everything inside of her clenched in revolt as she rounded the corner into the giant room where the siphon dwelled. She froze as she came into full view of the room.
Torches burned in the walls, flickering with hellish light. The siphon-plant filled the room, a tangle of root-like appendages, its long tentacles reaching into every corner of the room. Pan-sized leaves that grew from the tangles shuddered as if in some cosmic wind and turned toward her like elephant ears. The knotted heart of the great plant heaved. Across the length of the thing, along all of its vines, those ghastly glowing pods trembled. The eerie lights—blue, yellow, red, orange, green—lined the thing at different intervals, each pod ebbing with some phantom energy of its own.
The siphon stirred at her presence.
This sight, though terrifying enough alone, was what she expected to find. What she did not expect to find were the four figures that stood at random places around the room, knee-deep in the siphon’s foliage, drinking from the pods.
Perhaps drinking was the wrong word, she thought, for this was no conventional means of consumption.
Small, glass-like straws seemed to have grown out from the bases of the few pods next to which they stood and attached themselves in multitude, like branched icy webs, to the humanoid figures’ mouths.
The four figures were hunched over, attached, face-to-pod, drinking fluids through those glass-straw webs.
It only took a moment for them to see her.
Each one turned, one after the other, to face her.
13
The faces of the four figures were abhorrent. Perhaps once human, it was as if their features had been flattened or burned and swirled with some kind of dreadful gray wax. Their heads were hairless, ears flat without lobes, their eyes different colors and sizes. One of the faces had three eyes.
Their bodies were naked, the bodies of very old men, but somehow still thick with muscles, despite the sagging and generally mottled condition of their skin. As they turned toward her, the glassy strands detached from their mouths and retreated down into the pods from which they’d been drinking…feeding.
Nikki willed herself to move.
One of the humanoid men came toward her, quickly. A grotesque appendage jutted from between his legs, probing the air like a divining rod. The other three followed more slowly, as if drugged.
She had to move!
Shuddering, her body paralyzed with fear, gasping with shallow breath, she willed herself to move but she could not.
“Sisssslllleeeetttt-ahgahhhhhhh…” The humanoid closest to her made a slurring mess of whatever it tried to say. It reached out for her with sharp-tipped fingers. When it brushed her hand, she came out of her spell of stasis.
The other three beings came for her.
Nikki threw the kerosene lantern. It lobbed through the air and then came down in a flaming explosion of splattering fuel and broken glass. The splashes of kerosene carried fire everywhere as they fell. She gave a loud grunt and heaved the oil lamp on top of the blaze, too. It soared through the air, but didn’t travel as far as she’d hoped.
It sank into the tangles of vines and hit the floor beneath with a clang. It had cracked open not far from where the kerosene lantern started its own small blaze. The oil slowly spread.
The humanoid grabbed her arm. She turned and screamed in its face—in defiance, in terror. Up close, it gawped at her, its mouth a ruined maw of few teeth and a bluish tongue that lolled toward her. Its breath smelled like a thousand corpses. It held her with one hand, and struggled at the front of her pants with the other, trying to tear them off. Its jutting member, swollen and engorged with purple juices, swayed between them, as large as anything she’d ever seen in the business, but infinitely more grotesque.
The lamp oil finally caught fire.
The whole plant, huge as it was, filling the thirty-yard room, shuddered with fire and heaved, curling its tentacles toward the flames. She heard a forlorn moaning, as of some deep-space creature howling through comic reaches, a sound that echoed in ways that seemed impossible for the size and nature of the room. The very air around them rippled. Nikki felt a sway of dizziness, the push of heat.
The other three humanoids had reached her as well, but now that the plant was ablaze, they seemed less intent on raping her and more intent on pulling her deeper into the room. Each of the beings emitted a hissing sound from their flat, slotted noses. They clutched her, those sharp fingers digging painfully into her flesh.
She fell beneath their onslaught, but in the panic of the moment, her adrenaline surged and wouldn’t let her stay down. She kicked upward and crushed the genitals of one being, then two more. One clutched his groin and fell backward, the second reeled and toppled into the fire with a screech of anguish. Nikki reached up and grabbed her first assailant by his engorged cock-thing and yanked down, twice, three times, then twisted and yanked again. The meaty shaft ripped free and a brackish fluid oozed from the hole where it had been, followed by slender white things that curled from the new hole like worms…or pale roots. The being fell to its knees, its terrible eyes full of fury, its twisted features contorted in pain. She planted a kick in his chest, thrusting him back into her final assailant.
Nikki scrambled to her feet as the flames grew higher. The siphon caught; the blaze grew. Heat filled the room like a chamber of hell, and it smelled just as foul as she escaped it.
Nikki ran out into the catacombs. She turned and swung the heavy door closed behind her, locking it. Then she ran up the stairs, slipping once, then regained her footing and hurried the rest of the way up.
At the top of the stairwell, she slammed that door closed too. When it fell heavily into the frame, she nudged the bar down
so it fell into the lock notches, barring entry from below.
Blood surging, cheeks burning, skin crawling with the vestigial touch of the humanoids, Nikki fell back against the wall, breathing hard.
It took a moment for her to really wrap her head around what had happened. Then emotion began to push toward the surface, forced up from inside her, threatening to cripple her spirit.
Not yet, she thought.
Adam.
Nikki ran toward the parlor where she’d last seen Adam. She slowed before barging in, remembering the leopard-beast. She caught herself saying a prayer, something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She prayed that he was okay. Though it seemed unlikely, it felt okay for her to hope, so she let the hope in.
Nikki peered around the doorway into the parlor.
Both the leopard-beast and Adam lay on the carpet amid a scattered pile of broken furniture. Her heart caught in her throat.
Adam stirred.
Gasping with relief, Nikki rushed into the room. She knelt beside him. He lay on his side, bleeding from lacerations in his arms and across his ribs, his shirt torn away. His hands were bloody, covered with deep cuts. He opened his eyes and groaned as she gently turned him. She laughed, in spite of herself.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
“Yes,” he groaned, “you probably will.”
She laughed again, feeling on the verge of hysterics. They came in the form of uncontrollable giggles that she started to let loose as she held him. He was whispering in her ear. She stopped to listen.
“Watch it…” he said.
Instantly Nikki half stood, turning toward the leopard-beast.
It lay on its side in a position almost exactly opposite that of Adam Ross. The giant cat was definitely the worse for wear. It was panting, but not at all concerned with her. One eye was open. There were several shards of glass rammed into its throat, the black fur around those wounds wet with blood that seeped onto the carpet beneath. A splintered chair leg was rammed into the creature’s other eye, the one that lay against the ground. It had gone deep.
The creature panted, then suddenly stopped.
It lay still.
She realized something about the creature had changed. It was no longer half a man, with semi-human legs. It had somehow transformed into the pure shape of a black leopard. It was a huge and regal creature, and despite everything, something about its death made her feel a little sad. Only after she reminded herself that the creature had somehow once been a part of Adam, a part that had cursed his family for centuries, did she begin to loathe it again in remembrance of the lives it had taken. Revulsion for it overcame her, as if it were some form of vanquished evil.
When she looked back at Adam, it took her a moment to process the changes that had taken place in his body. He was still beaten and bloodied from the fight, but he looked heartier in color, some weight seemed to have magically grown on his frame, and his legs were thicker in his jeans, fuller.
“My God, Adam,” she said, returning to his side. “Your legs!”
His legs, and presumably the rest of him, had been restored. Just as the black beast was fully leopard—through some inexplicable transformation—Adam had also become fully human once again.
14
“Help me to my feet,” he said.
Nikki supported him as he stood. The palms of his hands were shredded from handling the glass shards. He ripped two strips off his tattered shirt and wrapped his palms tightly.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked him.
“I’ll be fine, as soon as we get the hell out of here.” Adam nodded toward the door of the kitchen, which stood partially open at the back of the room. The sight of Eleanor Masterson’s curled hand propping it open filled Nikki with another surge of sadness. Jesus, girl, pull yourself together. We’ve got out get out of this. You can’t start coming apart now.
Why she felt that having emotions about all of this was a bad thing, she couldn’t say. In fact, this was the first time in a long time that she really did feel something deep enough to move her. For so many years now, she’d just moved back and forth between being an aching bag of hurt, or alcoholically numb. Even when she and Nolan had been together, when she’d been pregnant, the proverbial sun had only just barely peeked through the clouds of her twenty-year charade of happiness as a porn queen. And she guessed that was why she’d taken it so hard when she lost the baby and it all came to an end with Nolan. Up until he’d come along, she’d felt nothing but numbness, hurt and self-loathing for so long she didn’t remember what it had been like to feel anything else. Now that the emotions were flooding back into her, she didn’t know how to react. It wasn’t the simple power of the emotions that disturbed her, only that they seemed to cloud her judgment at a time when she desperately needed clarity and focus. She wanted very much for her and Adam to get out of this alive. To get on a boat, to leave this godforsaken island and castle behind, and…
And what?
She knew the answer to that question. Knew right off the bat what she was thinking about: a potential life with this man, this mysterious Adam Ross. And she knew as soon as she admitted it to herself what a crazy, lunatic idea that was.
First things first. We have to get out of here.
Adam led the way across the parlor and pulled open the kitchen door. Nikki stepped inside behind him. They both hovered over Eleanor Masterson. There was no blood. Nikki looked around the kitchen. It was a giant room, with two long stainless steel tables, pots hanging from racks, and a wall of three ovens, plus a fireplace and smoker in a rounded corner. Long sinks and lots of dish racks lined the nearest wall. The place rang with an open quiet that was at once unsettling. Nikki couldn’t shake the feeling that something, or someone, might come in and find them at any minute.
There were only four of them downstairs, so that means Great-Grandpa Masterson is up here somewhere. And he’s not going to be happy.
Adam knelt next to Eleanor and felt for her pulse. Then he listened at her mouth.
“She’s alive,” he whispered.
Nikki felt a leap of joy in her chest at the news, but they had limited time.
“Can we revive her?”
Adam gingerly turned Eleanor’s head so she faced them. He lightly slapped her cheeks with his bandaged hands.
“Miss Masterson,” he said. “Eleanor, can you hear me?”
The elderly woman stirred. Her eyes moved beneath closed lids.
Adam turned to Nikki. “Cool water. Quick.”
Nikki went to the sink, her scuffling footsteps echoing from the stone floor. She turned on the faucet. The water stream roared into the bottom of the steel basin as she dampened a clean dishrag that was folded nearby. The water was ice-cold out of the tap. She hurried back to Eleanor Masterson’s side, touching the damp cloth to her forehead.
The elderly woman’s eyes fluttered open like startled butterflies. She looked up at them both, recognition slowly dawning.
“Oh my heavens,” she gasped. She gripped Adam’s forearm. “The beast—”
“Is dead,” Adam assured her.
“And Isaac…Dr. Falkenstein?”
Adam pressed his lips together. Nikki glanced at Adam, then met Eleanor’s eyes. She understood. Tears rimmed her painful gaze.
“Eleanor,” Adam said. “We have to know if there’s a fast way off this island.”
She blinked and struggled to sit up. Nikki and Adam helped her to a sitting position. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of one hand. Her throat worked, and her bottom jaw quivered. Then she looked at both of them. “There’s a boathouse not far from the dock where the ferry drops off. There’s a motorboat in there. It isn’t used often, but Isaac keeps it in good repair. There’s enough gas to get to the mainland. We always kept it…in case of emergencies.” The old woman’s eyes filled with more tears and Nikki shared her pain. This was an emergency all right. Everything she’d known, all that she had respected about her heritag
e and all they’d done here had come down around her in shambles. Like the rest of them, she’d lost everything. Nikki tried not to think too much about the hand she’d had in that destruction. She pulled the woman into a quick hug, then met her eyes and smiled with determination.
“We’re going to get out of here.”
Eleanor looked like she wasn’t sure she wanted that at all. Just for a moment, Nikki could see the internal struggle. Finally, Eleanor nodded.
“Let’s get you up,” Adam said. They lifted her to her feet, allowing her to drape her arms over their shoulders, giving her support to walk.
They left the kitchen and crossed the parlor. Eleanor gasped at the sight of the black leopard beast, slain and bloodied on the floor where Adam had killed it. The room was a disaster, and Nikki could see Eleanor’s eyes quietly counting the sentimental cost of everything in here that had been destroyed.
They passed through the doorway of the foyer into the Gothic-arched main hall. The alcove that led back to the catacombs was filled with smoke. They could smell the fire downstairs in the castle’s bowels, a smoky pungent scent drifting slowly into the upstairs. They passed the slightly open door of the library, through which Eleanor could see the eviscerated corpse of Dr. Falkenstein. Unfortunately, there was no avoiding the final horror—Isaac’s dead body lay on the red carpet just inside the massive front doors of the castle. One door stood open and a frigid wind blasted inside, carrying with it the crisp scent of winter.
The night was waiting.
Adam breathed heavily. Nikki could see he was feeling the exertion of everything he’d been through. Nikki was feeling it, too, but pure adrenaline got her through. Eleanor was limping, still making it, only requiring a small bit of effort as they traveled those last several yards to the front doors, bound for the front gates of the castle beyond.
Before they got there, the tall door that had remained closed was pulled open. Sharp, long and smooth fingers—grayish digits without fingernails—wrapped around its edge and pulled it wide. What felt like an arctic chill filled the corridor.
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